To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

E. Tracy Grinnell: from “body of war / songs” with a note on the process

after Danielle Collobert

the crowds

evisceral subjectssun-setting

in the sun

clashes waste

depopulating fray

afraid

hurled

_____________________

the
revolt

executed

in
spasms

projected

projectiles

human or plastic

embraces

shadows grounding

succumb

in
flashes of emptiness, rhetoric

galleries of disaster

so the remove

of frozen images

subterranean

habitation of

because earth absorbs
shock

waves

hands absent horizons

knock

impotently against

the walls

around

_____________________

the
deep tombs, sink under

stones
arranged

the
stones and gold

light

from another source

pierces
the front

of
solitude

the passage

suffering

encircles

infiltrates

the reflection of an abyss

in the morning

frost

_____________________

futility
mirrors

the
inertia

of
the face filtered

through
an obsolete

medium

the
wind

brushes

hands,
raised

carries
off voices

raised

what
we hear of it

the nightmare

sounds
off

the infant is born

into an aging infantry

carried aloft

against the earth

inscribed

on again

against a cliff’s edge

temporal

inflammatory

the fire nourishes

by what it consumes

____________________

attention
of destruction to

cradled into uncertainties

the corpsman logs

what
lays before

him

torrential
forces

force
of machinery’s

hard certainty

searches
the seas

peopled
with the coins

of
our present

gardens

are erasures of

penetration

immovable figure

situated

equivalent

deaths

of heros

who are

they

errant mutations

achievedNote.On “body of war / songs”

In 1961 Danielle Collobert
self-published an edition of poems titled Chants
des guerres. Some years later, she attempted to destroy all copies of the
book. I came to these particular poems via It
Then, via her Notebooks 1956-1978, and
recently Murder, first as reader and
then as editor/publisher. After the recent release of Murder
(translated by Nathanaël, published by Litmus Press), I went back to Chant des guerres to read them in the
original French (they are not translated into English). “body of war / songs”
is that foray into reading her early poems.

As with my other
explorations/experiments in translation, I consider translation a mode of
reading, and/or reading a mode of translating, and both as a mode of writing.
“body of war / songs” is very much after Collobert,
temporally, as homage, but also as exploratory translation. Initially, I
‘faithfully’ translated the terse minimalist poems, leaving spaces for words I
did not know. Then I translated some of these spaces, using a dictionary, or
making a homophonic translation. Then I simply wrote through the text as if it
were my own. Words shifted, altered, moved across the page, filled in,
departed.

There are a couple things
that interested me about this process of translating/creating – that
Collobert’s writing was so familiar to me, that the words, the syntax itself,
felt familiar. Not just because I have known her work since 1998 or so but
because of poetic affinity, of writing the body in/into the poems. The sense of
body, of the alienation of our bodies even in community. A sense of bodies
moving through the world and touching / not touching. The remove. Also, it
struck me that these poems written in 1961 could have been written now, or at
any time in the last 50 years: what has actually changed? War is an ongoing, perpetual, mode. How pressing that these poems –
Collobert’s – know this. It presses,
as relevant, but also as pressure to
write it, rewrite it.

In some ways, the distance
between my poem and hers, the distance in time, in language, in other removes,
between our poems and the wars they address, is also the distance between
‘zone’ and war zone. The remove of the U.S.
from the carnage it enacts, the remove under which we in the U.S. are able
to move about. Under drones, yes, fearful in the face of a lack of agency or
ability to alter, yes, but with a very different sense of security. So when the
carnage punctuates the remove, as it did in Boston most recently, we must translate this
proximity into compassion, empathy – a deeper level of comprehension.

[E. Tracy Grinnell is the author of Some Clear Souvenir (O Books, 2006), and Music or Forgetting (O Books, 2001). An excerpt from Helen: A Fugue was published alongside
Leslie Scalapino’s A Pear / Actions Are
Erased / Appear in volume #1 of Belladonna’s Elder Series (2008). New and
recent work is collected in the manuscripts Hell
Figures, portrait of a lesser subject,
and All the Rage. She is the founding
editor and director of Litmus Press.]

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A PROSPECTUS

In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

[For a complete checklist of previous postings through January 12, 2012, see below. The slot at the upper left can also be used for specific items or subjects. More recent posts are updated regularly here.]